Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Quad Core CPU

 

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility capable of benchmarking the performance of individual components inside a PC. Each of the benchmarks below were run a total of five times with the highest and lowest scores being discarded and an average being calculated from the remaining three.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While Sisoft Sandra results don’t generally tend to have much of a bearing on real-world performance, the results for the QX9650 pretty much crush the rest of the chips used in this review. In both the CPU Arithmetic and Multimedia tests Sandra takes full advantage of the 12MB L2 cache and quad-core architecture of the QX9650, offering results at almost double of the slightly lower clocked dual-core E6850.

 

Memory Bandwidth results also see the QX9650 take a significant lead, with the Q6600 taking last place this time mostly due to its slower clock speed and the way Sandra calculates memory throughput.

 

 

 

PCMark Vantage is the latest benchmarking suite from Futuremark. Differing significantly from their 3DMark suites, PCMark performs a series of benchmarks designed to recreate and benchmark scenarios of a PC being used for everyday tasks.  Vantage has a Vista only requirement as it actually relies on several different components from the OS in order to run correctly.

 

 

The QX9650 flies ahead of both the Q6600 and E6850, beating them both by around 1000 points. Interestingly, the Q6600 and E6850 fight it out for second position despite the Q6600’s two core advantage. This is quite possibly down to the brute-force performance of the E6850 with its 600mhz per-core advantage over the Q6600.